The 15 Best Tv Shows Of 2025 So Far Looper

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 10:52 PM

the 15 best tv shows of 2025 so far looper

Each year, TV networks, cable channels, and streaming services release their content to the masses, and much of it is entertaining. We used to complain that there was never anything good on, but these days, there's an overabundance of amazing content. This makes it challenging to find your next show to watch, as there are many excellent options. Whether it was a fresh season of an existing series or something entirely new, 2025 saw the arrival of some of the best television in recent years. Disney+ released more Marvel and "Star Wars" content, while a new "Alien" show introduced the menacing monsters to Earth. Several long-awaited season follow-ups finally debuted, reinvigorating each series for a wider audience of viewers.

Whatever your preferred genre, there was something great to watch in 2025, and as of this writing, there's still room for more amazing entries. But until those appear, each of the following shows blew away the competition and should be on everyone's "must see" list of 2025 TV series. Be sure to binge them before 2026 comes along with its own incredible content. Marvel knocked it out of the park when it debuted "Daredevil" on Netflix in 2015. The gritty street-level superhero story was personal, tragic, hopeful, and remarkably dramatic. But when Marvel Studios began generating new content for Disney+, "Daredevil" was one of many characters who didn't initially make the leap into the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe's television output.

Fortunately, that decision was eventually reversed when Charlie Cox reprised the role of Matt Murdock for a brief cameo in "Spider-Man: No Way Home." He then popped up in "She-Hulk: Attorney at Law" and... Just when you thought the post-Peak TV glacier of shows had melted into a puddle of mediocre algorithm-feeders, the medium snapped back to form in 2025. We may not be in the midst of a new golden age — streamers and cable networks alike are muddling their way through a very uncertain media landscape (see Netflix’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery just this morning!) — but this year delivered a handful of truly original shows that did more than throw A-list stars at a paper-thin plot and try to pass it off as prestige. The series that stood out were daring, stylish, and had something to say about the world we live in today. Oh, and they were damn entertaining, too.

Whether dissecting Hollywood or the health care industry, exploring history or an alternate universe, making us laugh or making us cry (and sometimes both), these 15 shows, presented here in alphabetical order, proved that... This four-part British limited series, about a kid accused of murdering a classmate, hit Netflix on a Friday with little to no advance fanfare; by the end of the weekend, it was the most... A labor of love from director Philip Barantini and co-writer and star Stephen Graham, Adolescence starts with cops bursting into the home of an average suburban family and arresting 13-year-old Jamie Miller (newcomer Owen... Each episode then focuses on the aftermath via a different perspective, from Jamie’s fellow students to his family members; Episode Three, a standoff between Cooper’s incarcerated teen and a psychologist played by Erin Doherty,... And as with Barantini and Graham’s previous collaboration, the proto-Bear chef drama Boiling Point, everything is shot in a single extended take. There’s a reason this import dominated the 2025 Emmys, but even if it hadn’t walked away with armfuls of statues, it would still leave you feeling like you’ve been gut-punched.

—David Fear The sophomore (and final) season of Tony Gilroy’s Star Wars prequel series doubled down on the revolutionary spirit, delivering an even deeper sausage-factory view of how the Rebellion was made while still giving fans... The fact that Diego Luna’s Cassian and his fellow freedom fighters were fighting a fascist empire a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away almost feels incidental; few works of mass entertainment... These 10 episodes had their share of thrills and chills, first-class villains (especially Denise Gough’s imperial apparatchik), highly memeable moments — dance like no one’s watching, Mon Mothma! — and a sequence inside an enemy hospital that played like a stand-alone heist movie. But the season also offered a chilling look at how authoritarian governments use misinformation and manipulate certain populations into enemies.

The I.P. will be with us, always, but Gilroy’s contribution to the canon will be missed. It was even more invaluable the second time around. —D.F. Writer Mike Makowsky, best known for his zippy 2019 HBO film Bad Education, took one of the oddest side plots in American history and made it one of the most riveting shows of the... Based on Candice Millard’s book Destiny of the Republic, Death By Lighting chronicles, over a tight yet expansive-feeling four episodes, the 1881 assassination of President James A.

Garfield (played with stoicism by Michael Shannon) by an unstable fan turned hater named Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen, better than ever). It’s an original story of standom gone wrong that tackles the scourge of American violence. It’s also deeply amusing, featuring basically every character actor you know and love (lookin’ at you, Nick Offerman, Bradley Whitford, and Shea Whigham) in a big bushy beard, absolutely killing it. —Esther Zuckerman One of the year’s most delightful surprises was this sleeper hit in the vein of Slow Horses — it centers on a group of misfit cops in Scotland — but with a bit more... Matthew Goode, who’s bounced around in rom-coms and period pieces and legal dramas, absolutely melts into the lead role of Carl Morck, a prickly and misanthropic detective returning to work after an on-the-job shooting...

Banished to a basement office and saddled with a bunch of dead-end cold cases, he becomes the leader of a motley crew of crimefighting wannabes. At home, meanwhile, he’s saddled with an annoying roommate and an angry teenager — the son of an ex-wife who up and left him. With The Queen’s Gambit creator Scott Frank at the helm, the writing is assured and the pacing is swift. The show builds suspense but never at the expense of feeling; some of the most quietly poignant scenes are between Morck and his hospitalized partner (played by Jamie Sives), two men communicating a lot... The case the Dept. Q oddballs end up solving is less memorable than the characters themselves — a recipe for a show with legs.

—Maria Fontoura If there’s one thing that’s defined television in the first half of 2025, it’s that hit shows as wide-ranging as Severance, The White Lotus, and Andor weren’t hindered by strike-induced production delays; instead, absence... Additionally, there have been new series just as worthy of our time, whether it was a razor-sharp Hollywood satire or an anxiety-inducing medical drama. For all that and more, check out The Ringer’s best shows of 2025 so far. The third season of the HBO anthology series The White Lotus had its fair share of detractors who found fault with its languid pacing and trigger-happy finale. To which I say: Even a lesser season of Mike White’s opus is better than damn near everything else on television.

As The White Lotus moves to Thailand, all the familiar ingredients remain in place: über-wealthy guests trying to throw money at all their problems, an incident on hotel grounds that leads to a body... Striking a balance between provocative and profound—best encapsulated by Sam Rockwell’s god-tier monologue in the fifth episode—The White Lotus uses its Eastern setting to explore a very Western kind of spiritual malaise, and how... Once again, the show’s A-list ensemble delivers the goods, and some up-and-comers announce themselves in the mainstream. (Sam Nivola, Sarah Catherine Hook, Patrick Schwarzenegger … we will watch your careers with great interest.) Was Season 3 a perfect stay at The White Lotus? Perhaps not, but it was still a rich experience in more ways than one. —Miles Surrey

The Ringer’s 2025 Midyear Pop Culture Awards The 10 Best Movies of the Year ... So Far The Ringer’s 2025 Midyear Pop Culture Awards 2025 has been an exceptional year for television, delivering everything from long-awaited finales to bold new originals. We’ve been eating good all year round, with Stranger Things, Severance, The Last of Us, Squid Game, Pluribus, and Alien: Earth just a few of the TV hits from the past 12 months.

Some of the biggest success stories have been the releases no one saw coming. Adolescence blew our minds with its one-shot story that delivered a gut-punch of emotions, while The Pitt breathed new life into the medical drama sub-genre. But that hasn’t overshadowed the returning heavyweights, with 2025 seeing the arrival of the fifth and final chapter of Stranger Things, the last season of Squid Game, and the long-awaited second runs from Severance,... So, as 2026 fast approaches, we’ve rounded up our favourite series of the year — the shows that genuinely stuck with us, had us counting down the days for new episodes, or, in many... Below, you’ll find our picks for the best TV shows of 2025, ranked in order of preference. What it’s about: This prequel to Stephen King’s It explores the origins of Pennywise and the titular town’s sinister past as a new generation encounters horrors lurking beneath its surface.

Fourteen years ago, Emily Nussbaum, one of my esteemed predecessors in the TV-critic chair, notoriously titled her Top Ten list “I Hate Top Ten Lists.” I’ve seldom felt the same. I’m not much of a holiday person, but, for most of the time that I’ve been a working critic, I’ve loved the end-of-year ritual of sorting the so-so from the superb and the overhyped... I’ve always taken seriously—probably too seriously—the privilege of giving hidden gems another chance to shine. New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows. But, in 2025, I can’t say that curating such a roundup was much fun. This year, as executives backed away from the kind of risky, ambitious programming that marked the last golden age of television, the industry’s decline was evident from its output.

TV felt smaller. There were few epics like “The Last of Us” and “Alien: Earth,” which, while entertaining, were ultimately constrained by their source material. Several of the year’s most prominent prestige series—“Severance,” “Andor,” “Adolescence,” “The Bear,” “The White Lotus,” and “The Studio”—were, to my mind, ponderous, shallow, or both. I was especially disheartened by the dearth of straightforward sitcoms, as the comedy ecosystem continues to migrate online and becomes increasingly, sometimes incomprehensibly, niche. In the past, keeping tabs on all the boundary-pushing shows could be a lonely affair; there were always series that I felt sure were only being watched by other TV critics. But, in such an uninspired year, I found my yardstick for what constitutes great television shifting.

Though the traditional standards of excellence—innovation, ambition, execution, distinctiveness, and relevance—still apply, I was more inclined to highlight projects that I wanted to discuss (and debate) with other people. The water cooler may never be reinstalled, but these shows made me crave its return. In 1881, a man named Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield in a bid to be remembered in the history books; instead, he consigned both himself and his victim to the footnotes. This lively excavation of the entwined fates of Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen) and Garfield (Michael Shannon) makes for a twisty, political period drama, as well as a haunting parable for our violent times. The killer’s obsession with achieving glory isn’t the only element that feels startlingly modern, with anachronistic touches lending the series an unusual brio. A focus on Garfield’s sense of duty and grand agenda underscores what was lost with his death—and invites the question of what he might have achieved had he lived.

Look, 2025 may just be a little more than half over, but it’s already been a great year of television for both new and returning shows. Severance returned after a three-year hiatus and did not disappoint. Hacks continues to show that comedies can be comedic. HBO hits like The Gilded Age and The White Lotus returned with new seasons that delighted viewers. And broadcast proved that it can still hold its own against cable and streaming with some solid series. HBO Max delivered a solid hit with the debut of the new medical drama The Pitt, while Paradise reunited Sterling K.

Brown and Dan Fogelman for a show very different from This Is Us. And Apple TV+ offered a look inside Hollywood with The Studio. Below, TV Insider’s staff has gathered to share our picks for the Best Shows of 2025 so far (taking into account those that have aired through the first week of August). Let us know what makes your list in the comments section below. If you want to know your favorite reality TV stars’ favorite reality TV show, look no further than Love on the Spectrum U.S.. Featuring vibrant series newbies, Madison Marilla and Pari Kim, alongside returning favorites Abbey Romeo, Tanner Smith, Connor Tomlinson, Dani Bowman, James Jones, and more, Season 3 takes the Netflix docuseries to the next level,...

The 15 Best Tv Shows Of 2025 So Far Looper

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